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arXiv:2505.15552 · Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics

Robust atom interferometry with super-Gaussian pulses against thermal velocity spread

Yujuan Liu, Ziwen Song, Tingting Lin, Biao Tang, Aoxing Hao

Published Nov 19, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Laser frequency fluctuation and atomic thermal motion can lead to errors in pulse area and detuning in cold atom interferometry, thereby reducing measurement stability and fringe contrast. To address this issue, we investigate the use of super-Gaussian pulses, which are characterized by smooth temporal profiles and centralized energy distribution, in the beam-splitting and reflection stages of an atom interferometer. In this theoretical and numerical study, we compare the performance of rectangular, Gaussian, and 2nd- to 10th-order super-Gaussian pulses subject to deviations in pulse area and detuning. Our results show that both Gaussian and super-Gaussian pulses offer a significant advantage over traditional rectangular pulses, particularly under thermal conditions where velocity spread is prominent. We find that 4th-order pulses achieving up to a 87.9% improvement in contrast over rectangular pulses under realistic conditions, and while their peak performance at very low temperatures is comparable to that of Gaussian pulses, they demonstrate enhanced robustness against combined detuning and pulse area errors. These findings demonstrate that super-Gaussian pulse shaping is an effective method for enhancing the robustness of atom interferometers against errors induced by thermal motion.

DOI
10.1088/1361-6455/ae216e

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Abstract The key role of π- and π/2-pulses in atom interferometry has been widely recognized as their efficiency affect the overall performance of atomic interferometers. The inefficiencies are evident when using thermal cloud atoms as the field interaction does not compensate for the atom velocity. Temporal pulse shaping offers a solution to this issue by balancing the effect of the temporal shape of the mirror pulse in thermal cold atom interferometry by testing pulse shapes beyond the standard rectangle including Gaussian-like, Sinc-like, optimized Band-selective Uniform Response Pure-phase family, and optimized Gaussian Cascade family. We unveiled a correlation between the π-pulse fidelity and the overall interferometer contrast function. We also found robust pulse sequences with respect to initial atom velocities that offer contrast as high as 0.7 compared to standard rectangle sequences with values of 0.2. The investigated pulse sequences offer an efficient way to improve the performance of atom interferometers, increasing the potential of thermal cold atom interferometry.
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The mirrors and beamsplitters of atom interferometers often suffer from inhomogeneities in coupling strength and effective detuning because different atoms see different laser intensities, Zeeman and Doppler shifts and are in different Zeeman sub-states. This limits the fringe visibility for a simple interferometer, which falls off rapidly if extra mirrors are added, for example to increase the interferometer area. In practice, one usually therefore filters the atomic velocities/sub-states, thus losing signal, and/or restricting operation to small-area interferometers with low sensitivity. The problem is familiar in the field of NMR, where, instead of using simple pi or pi/2 pulses, the phase and potentially amplitude are modulated during the pulse so as to make the result robust to the inhomogeneities encountered. Despite the similarities with NMR systems, the numbers, correlations and performance measures for atom interferometry are different. We have used optimal control theory to obtain robust high fidelity mirror pulses for atom interferometry. Importantly, while the designs are found by computational simulation, we can validate them experimentally, with remarkably good agreement. We have addressed the optimization of individual mirror pulses, but the eventual aim is to optimize the interferometer as a whole: errors introduced in one pulse can be compensated at a later stage, for example. Our pulses yield high contrast without the need to filter the atomic sample and maintain this even in the case of extended pulse sequences, thus making it possible to achieve significantly larger interferometer areas than with simple pi pulses.
The precision of atom interferometry is affected by system errors due to the laser parameters and atomic velocity. We propose the method of the Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage(STIRAP) to enhance the accuracy of the atom interferometry and its tolerance for the environment. We calculate the fidelity of the target atomic state for the cases of the STIRAP technique, rectangular pulse and Gaussian pulse. It is shown that the fidelity of the atomic state obtained with the STIRAP technique is higher than that with rectangular pulse and Gaussian pulse. In addition, higher interference fringe contrast of the atom interferometry can be obtained with the pulse sequence consisting of STIRAP than the rectangular pulse sequence and Gaussian pulse sequence. This scheme may have promising applications in precise measurements with atom interferometry.
The uniformity of the intensity and the phase of laser beams is crucial to high-performance atom interferometers. Inhomogeneities in the laser intensity profile cause contrast reductions and systematic effects in interferometers operated with atom sources at micro-Kelvin temperatures and detrimental diffraction phase shifts in interferometers using large momentum transfer beam splitters. We report on the implementation of a so-called top-hat laser beam in a long-interrogation-time cold-atom interferometer to overcome the issue of inhomogeneous laser intensity encountered when using Gaussian laser beams. We characterize the intensity and relative phase profiles of the top-hat beam and demonstrate its gain in atom-optic efficiency over a Gaussian beam, in agreement with numerical simulations. We discuss the application of top-hat beams to improve the performance of different architectures of atom interferometers.